I’ve spent 30 years in banking, most of it either being coached or coaching someone else. Somewhere in there I stopped thinking of it as management and started thinking of it as the actual job — the lending itself was always going to change with the market, but the part where you help someone else get better at doing it well is the part that’s stayed constant the whole way through.
This isn’t a framework. I’ve read plenty of coaching frameworks over three decades, and most of them describe a version of the job that doesn’t survive contact with a genuinely difficult conversation. This is closer to what I’ve actually learned, in the order it usually shows up.
The First Lesson: Coaching Isn’t Managing Tasks
Early in my career, I thought a good manager was someone who caught mistakes before they became problems — checking files, correcting errors, keeping things moving. That’s supervision, not coaching, and I mistook one for the other for longer than I’d like to admit.
The actual shift happened when I noticed the lenders I was constantly correcting never seemed to improve, while the ones I mostly left alone — but occasionally asked a genuinely hard question — kept getting better on their own. Coaching, it turns out, is mostly about building someone’s own judgment so they don’t need you checking their work in the first place. Supervision treats the symptom. Coaching treats the actual gap.
Targets Reveal What You Actually Value, Whether You Mean Them To Or Not
Every target you set teaches a lending team something, whether you intend it to or not. A pure volume target teaches people to chase easy files and avoid complicated ones. A target with no room for genuine bad luck — a market downturn, a policy change mid-cycle — teaches people to blame themselves for things outside their control, which erodes confidence faster than almost anything else I’ve watched happen to a team.
I’ve written elsewhere about what actually happens to a team’s numbers when the rate cycle turns against them — but the deeper lesson underneath that specific situation is this: a target set without ever being explained, or without ever being revisited when conditions genuinely change, isn’t really a target. It’s just a number someone’s expected to hit regardless of whether hitting it was ever realistic.
The Best Lenders Aren’t the Most Confident Ones — They’re the Ones Who Know When to Ask
I used to assume the strongest new lenders were the ones who seemed most sure of themselves. I was wrong more often than I was right. The lenders who genuinely developed fastest weren’t the most confident — they were the ones willing to say “I haven’t seen this before” and actually check, rather than guessing and hoping it worked out.
This matters more in lending than in a lot of other sales roles, because a confident guess on an unfamiliar income structure or property type doesn’t just cost a sale — it can genuinely cost a client money, or worse, put them into a loan they can’t actually sustain. Coaching someone toward comfortable uncertainty, rather than false confidence, has been one of the harder and more counterintuitive things I’ve had to teach.
Trust Is the Actual Product, and It Compounds Slower Than You’d Like
A mortgage is a transaction. Trust is what determines whether that transaction happens once or whether it’s the first of several over someone’s lifetime, and whether they send their friends and family your way afterward. Settlement day is genuinely the start of that relationship, not the end of it — I’ve watched too many capable lenders undervalue what happens after the file closes, purely because it doesn’t count toward this month’s number.
The coaching implication is straightforward but hard to actually build into a team’s habits: reward and notice the follow-up conversation, not just the closed file. A team that only gets recognised for new business will quietly stop investing in the relationships that would have brought them the next three deals without any prospecting at all.
Compliance Isn’t a Constraint on Good Coaching — It’s Part of It
I’ve watched managers treat responsible lending obligations as a compliance checkbox that sits awkwardly next to “real” coaching about sales performance. That’s a genuine mistake. A sales technique that works by rushing a client past genuine uncertainty isn’t actually a sales skill in lending — it’s a liability wearing a sales skill’s clothing, and coaching a team well means teaching that distinction explicitly, not assuming it’s obvious.
The lenders who’ve had the longest, most sustainable careers in my experience are the ones who never separated “doing right by the client” from “doing well for themselves.” Those two things were never actually in tension as often as people assume — they just take longer to pay off than the alternative.
Regional Teams Need Genuinely Different Coaching Than Metro Ones
Most coaching advice is written with a capital-city team in mind — dense referral networks, a large pool of comparable recent transactions, a manager who can walk the floor and observe conversations in person daily. None of that describes coaching a team spread across the ACT, Illawarra, and Riverina, where a lender might be the only person in their branch handling a genuinely unusual rural income structure, with no colleague down the hall who’s seen it before.
The coaching adaptation that’s mattered most here is building a habit of proactively reaching out to less experienced or more isolated team members before a problem surfaces, rather than waiting for them to raise it — because in a regional setting, the isolation itself is often the actual risk, not any specific skill gap.
New Lenders Need a Completely Different Kind of Coaching Than Experienced Ones
A lender’s first six months look nothing like their fifth year, and coaching both the same way is one of the more common mistakes I’ve watched new managers make. Early on, the priority is building the instinct to recognise unfamiliar territory and ask before proceeding. Years in, the priority shifts entirely — toward refining judgment on genuinely ambiguous calls, and eventually toward developing their own ability to coach others.
What Hasn’t Changed, Across Every Rate Cycle and Every Market Shift
Lending products have changed. Technology has changed enormously. The regulatory environment has changed more than once. What hasn’t changed, across three decades and multiple full rate cycles, is this: a genuinely good lender is built through specific, honest feedback close to when something actually happened, real ownership over their own client relationships, and a manager willing to say “the market got harder, you didn’t get worse” when that’s actually true.
Everything else — the frameworks, the acronyms, the training modules — is packaging around that one constant.
Related Reading
- Coaching a Lending Team Through a Rate-Rise Slump
- What Actually Works Coaching a Lending Team (Not Another Framework)
- What Actually Keeps a Good Lender: Retention Beyond the Benefits Package
Written by Michael Wignall, who’s spent 30+ years in banking and home lending, including leading a team of home lenders across three regions of NSW.
